April 10, 2014

I promised a friend of mine I would post the pictures of my latest quilt project.... last fall. It has seriously taken me longer to put the photos up then it did to make the quilts. In fact, Brianna took these photos for me in February and even uploaded them but I never got around to actually writing a post.

Which is saying a lot! I do all my quilting by hand so it can take me months to finish a quilt.

The one above is Samuel's. He chose all the fabrics and helped me decide on the pinwheel design. I loved his choice of fabrics so much I told him he will have to choose all my fabrics from now on. I do not have a great eye for such things but he just walked in the fabric store and said, "I like this... and this... and this..."

The way these blocks are made there was so much wasted fabric when you trimmed the blocks down before piecing the final pinwheels together. I was thinking what a pity it is. When my grandmother made a quilt it was a matter of need. They were cold. They couldn't afford high heating expenses. They made quilts. And they couldn't afford designer fabrics. They used the scraps of whatever else was no longer good for anything else... including linens, curtains, clothes and even feed sacks.

And here we spend $100 on fabric to make a quilt and are left with a bag full of scraps that presumably would end up in a box in the attic. I was pregnant with Addison at the time and decided to piece those scraps together into a quilt for him. And the one below was the result. You can see slight variations in the pinwheels.

I have sewed something special for each of my kids. I wanted to finish Samuel's before I worked on Henry's because he had waited patiently for his turn to have a Mama quilt. But he told me I should finish Henry's first because a new baby was going to need a quilt to keep warm.

So as my pregnancy progressed with Henry it was a race to finish his quilt before he came. Which I did just a week or so before his arrival.

Kaitlin was inspired by the remaining scraps to makeover his bassinet. He's just about getting to the point where he will need to move to a regular crib and we are all sorry to know his beautiful bed will be packed away.

The last three quilts I have made had button details. The kids love the way it looks. I love the way it looks, too.

If you are a quilter I will warn you that you need to reinforce in the layers with some interfacing because the tugging on the buttons does weaken the backing fabric.

I don't do much quilting in the summer. We are outside all the time and it is not necessarily a project you can just carry out to the pool. Plus, quilting is a warm sort of activity and Maryland summer's can get very warm. I ended up finishing Sammy's quilt on our trip to Boston last November. I had thought to tuck it away until Christmas. But Sam kept asking me how it was coming. So one night, after he was asleep, I covered him up with his quilt.

Now I am back to a multi year quilt project of finishing one of my grandmother's quilts. It is so close to done and I had really thought to have it finished this winter. But, to be honest, my hands are at a point that I have hardly worked on it. I have started a new treatment for arthritis in the last month and I am having great results with it so hopefully soon you will be seeing my namesakes finished project up here.

How about you? What projects have you finished up lately or what are you working on now?

Kathleen Wachter

Most of all I am a Christian, wife and home school mom to nine. Here you will find snippets from my life, recipes, tips for child rearing, home schooling advice and moments from our journey with down syndrome.